


pulse

by captainkilly



Category: Band of Brothers (TV 2001)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Crush at First Sight, M/M, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Speech Disorders, Touching, this is how you deal with grief and trauma and feeling uprooted, unspoken pile of feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-07
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-13 21:41:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29907489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainkilly/pseuds/captainkilly
Summary: Ron Speirs knows how to kill. Knows how to hurt, how to twist, how to maim. He doesn't think he's figured out how to love, not really, not where it counts the most, but the touches he reserves for Chuck Grant beg to differ..
Relationships: Charles Grant/Ronald Speirs
Comments: 6
Kudos: 24





	pulse

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this gifset](https://basilone.tumblr.com/post/644484936275001344/descending-figure-epithalamium-by-louise) I made a little while ago.

* * *

The first time he meets Chuck Grant, he pulls his knife free from an enemy and drops the body at the man’s feet.

As far as first impressions go, it’s not Ron’s finest moment. He blinks as he takes Grant in. Blinks again in recognition. Sheaths the knife, then glances around before meeting the man’s curious gaze. Good humor flashes in Grant’s eyes, quick as anything, and a smile seems to tug at the corners of his mouth despite the situation they’re in.

“Flash?”

“Thunder,” he grins back, wildly unapologetic, and extends a bloodied hand to the other soldier. “Speirs, I’m with Dog.”

The man’s hand is warm in his own. Firm, with a steady weight to it, and lingering a moment too long for a mere greeting. The touch grows slick from the blood Ron carries on his skin, but the other doesn’t so much as flinch.

“Grant, with Easy. Think I’ve seen ya at Toccoa, yeah?”

“Likewise.” He nods, having placed the man now. Smart, capable, and most importantly unflappable. “You always put Sobel on the wrong foot. I remember that.”

“Complained about me, did he?”

Ron makes a noncommittal sound in the back of his throat. Sobel had not so much complained as made veiled comments, which had served to draw the ire of men not used to mincing words. His own sergeants were of one mind on Sobel’s expulsion long before it took effect. He knows the man before him had a hand in creating this shared opinion in the men of Dog Company, though he has no idea how Grant managed it.

Then Grant steps over the body as though he’s stepping over a log in the forest, not even pausing in the motion to glance down at all, and he wonders no longer.

“Please tell me you know where Sainte-Mère-Église is.”

“I have a vague inkling.” He shrugs. Flexes his hand as he drops it to the knife’s sheath. “The number of hedgerows came as a surprise.”

Grant’s soft laughter sends a shiver down his spine. It is almost like he has not just killed a man with a weapon they’d tried to tell him to never rely on over a gun. Yet, he’d lost the gun. Lost himself there, too, merely a moment, suspended between air and water and the next gulp of breath. And he feels a little weightless like that again now that Grant’s shoulder brushes past his and their hands almost meet.

He settles for grasping the man’s wrist instead. Wraps his fingers around it tightly enough to find Grant’s pulse beneath his thumb. His mouth goes dry at the steady _thud-pause-thud_ of its leaps.

“Not that way,” he says, once words stop failing him. “I think down from where you came, then take a sharp left?”

“Yeah, probably? I came from the other way. Nothing there but cows and a broken radio.”

“You had a run-in with the cows, too?”

He doesn’t know what it means that he hasn’t let go of Grant’s wrist yet. Doesn’t know why the man merely bends to this touch until his fingers touch Ron’s sleeve and tangle with the fabric.

“French cows are evil,” nods Grant, then, as decisive as anything, “and the second I’m reunited with my bazooka these hedgerows are gonna be toast.”

“You have a –“

“Yeah. I like making things go boom, sir.”

“Grant?”

“Sir?”

“Remind me why you’re not in my company.”

The grin Grant shoots his way is quick, conspiratorial, and entirely too warm for the middle of a war. He bites his tongue. Fights the fluttering, treacherous feeling that swoops through him harder than he’s fought any enemy before.

“Well, sir,” starts Grant, and he wishes he could carve this feeling from his belly altogether, “I’m in your company right now but I think that is sort of beside the point..”

He listens as the war takes shape around him. Allows Grant to anchor him and keep him ashore.

The knots in his belly loosen further with every touch.

* * *

Of all the things that should make him feel alive, being shot probably should not have counted as one of them. He knows there’s some luck involved – arteries, he’s discovered, are fragile things so easily severed – and perhaps this is what sparks the joy that threatens to spill from his mouth sometimes.

_All my luck is yours,_ he’s said to war, over and over again, and thinks maybe she acknowledged it as prayer.

Ron groans as the dull ache settles in his upper leg and ripples a tremor through his body. He’s better off than most, here, and any sound he makes is drowned out by the screams and cries of men he’s not sure have ever offered prayers to the thing that almost killed them. He hears the names of God, of mothers, of wives, perhaps even of children sing in the mouths of those he is surrounded by.

He doesn’t understand it at all.

A hand closes around his ankle. Taps out a pattern in greeting with almost familiar fingers, then vanishes in pressure.

“I’m awake,” he responds.

“Good.”

He squints up at the dark. Recognizes the shape of the man after a moment, for he’s studied the lines and angles of this silhouette framed against very dim light several times before. They were on opposite ends of the companies in Normandy. Never shared a battlefield between them, nor a foxhole to rest in. They were on opposite ends of this ward, too, before now, and yet Ron thinks he’d know him blind. He could be robbed of sight and still know him by voice alone.

“Grant,” he murmurs. Moving hurts, so he keeps still and hopes his voice carries. “What is it?”

“Budge a bit?”

He frowns. There’s no formality between them at this hour – was there ever, come to think of it? – and it’s murmured in a voice that doesn’t carry. He clamps down on the hurt that shoots through him as he shifts backward. Doesn’t make a sound as his upper back hits the wall and his feet brush against the cool plaster.

Grant’s movements are quiet. Small. Precise. A hand brushes against his arm, a shoulder jostles itself into the space between him and the mattress’s edge, a breath lands warm on his cheek. Grant folds himself into the emptiness between Ron and the rest of the world with movements that never halt, never waver, never surrender a quarter of who he is.

Envy coils thick and syrupy in his belly and wraps needles around his gestures. He is all hard edges a moment as Grant’s wisps of hair brush against his forehead, then retracts the ache that swallows his insides and makes them lurch in empty air. Whatever tugs at his navel all aflutter has no basis with which to take flight from the trap he’s set deep inside. He cages the feeling of Grant’s hand against his own, Grant’s legs interweaving with his own until his knee thunders protest and he wraps a leg around the man just to be free of the ache, Grant’s everything being right here and warm beneath his freezing fingers.

He can’t give this any wings.

“How is your shoulder?”

He asks this to distract. Asks so he can control the deluge.

“I’ll live.”

In the silver and blue midnight hour, all he can see is the light in Grant’s eyes and the shadows that sweep across his features. Warm is the exhale of air and the hand that finds his fingers to wrap around. And if he would bend his head, tuck himself close beneath the man’s chin, come to rest near that chest which obscures the world from view, he has no doubt he’d hear the steady beat of a heart unswayed by war.

He loses control even when he does nothing at all.

“Why are we on the floor?” he is asked, and the world vanishes in the tailspin of his own heartbeat set to freefall. “Why sleep here?”

“Feels safest.” _Before you came,_ he wants to say, but he squeezes Grant’s fingers a little too gently for that to be true. “I don’t want..”

Don’t want the world to come in. Don’t want to be reminded of all I stand to lose.

He exhales a breath, noisy and restless, and shifts until his weight crashes against Grant. Until he’s the one who’s heavy, and everywhere, and too much to bear.

“Yeah,” breathes Grant, and pulls him closer still, “I know the feeling.”

_I don’t want the morning,_ he almost whispers. He keeps midnight locked between their bodies. Prays the sun will be swayed from rising. If death is to sweep more than the field of battle, then let him be found lying here.

If given wings to fly, he could reach the other’s heart.

Ron remains still, and wrestles sleep from the moon’s gaping jaw.

* * *

He trickles blood onto fresh snow.

His arms feel heavy. Sharp, like the knife his fingers are clenched tight around, and unyielding. He spits ire and blood out his mouth in equal measure. Wipes at his chin, his neck, his chest with an already dirtied sleeve.

“Sir!”

He blinks as there’s a familiar voice mixed in with the heavy crunch of snow beneath new boots, the sound of supplies being handed out in a hurry, and the hustle and bustle of a Christmas Day in the Bois-Jacques forest. Blinks again as the source of the voice swims into view now that he thinks himself clean of most of the blood.

“Chuck,” he says, wrong-footed and entirely stupefied. “What–?”

“Was on leave in London, sir,” responds Chuck Grant, smiling at him like a small child being handed a gift on Christmas morning. “Didn’t get the chance to jump in until now.”

“Easy’ll be pleased to see you,” he remarks. Makes no mention of how the tightness in his chest is set to loosen at being locked in by the man’s steady gaze. “They need men like you out there on the line.”

“You in reserve again?”

He rolls his eyes. “So they tell me.”

Chuck’s short laugh sounds like a bark of joy. “I can tell it disagrees with you,” remarks the man. There’s something smug in the tone, as if they share a secret that has just been confirmed again. “Or, should I say, the German line disagreed with you?”

“Five less to worry about.”

Chuck knows about his tally. Knows he counts any advantage, any threat neutralized, any life lost that lets him keep these men safe just a minute longer than before. They haven’t been shoulder to shoulder in this war, never shared combat between them that made the earth color deepest red, but he’s spoken of the weight of the numbers before.

He’s murmured the numbers into the night, before the tears came and he was human in the flood. These are the things his wife threw at his feet long before he broke what was left of the home he’d built to keep death at bay. These are the things that are hard to love when you are young and carry new life tucked beneath your heart. He doesn’t fault her leaving. Only faults himself for stepping into a house and thinking it could hold a battlefield in its timber.

He doesn’t remember a time before the blood on his face, the cold weaponry in his hands, the death that treads light in the shadow of his footsteps.

“All right,” says Chuck, and there’s no value attached to the assurance in his voice, “that’s five less. Come here.”

He’s the one who should give the orders, he knows, but his feet carry him to stand before the man before he can stop himself from following the unspoken gravity within the demand.

“That’s your scarf,” he says, dully, right before the coarse fabric brushes his face and swipes at the blood. “Chuck –”

“Hush. It’s fine.”

Warm fingers grasp his jaw. Tilt his face up to the light, to the sun, to the open air. His fists clench, then unravel beneath the motions of the fabric traveling a certain path over his neck and collarbones. There’s no flight in the certainty of Chuck’s motions. He lets it wash over him. Lets it wash him clean.

“You look like you’ve been drinking their blood.” There’s a laugh in Chuck’s voice. There’s a light in his eyes, now that he wrenches his gaze away from the sky and studies the man’s face. “Adding to the myth, sir?”

“The current status of the story is indeed a little more vampiric in nature,” he confesses, and can’t help the slight smile from curving at his lips. “I think some of Fox’s men are convinced I’m some Roman soldier turned on the field of battle, content to feed off scraps from any fight’s table.”

Chuck snorts out audible disgust. “They’re a bunch of yokels all right. I’d tell you to avoid the sunlight just to fuck with them, but I doubt it’d make a difference.”

“It makes a good story.”

“I liked the other one. The one where you’re just some immortal who got bored and wanders into battles just to have something to do.”

“I liked the one before that,” he murmurs, “of being chosen by the god of war herself.”

“Only you would call that god a woman,” laughs Chuck, and wraps the scarf warm around his neck. “Something to do with temptation, no doubt.”

“No.”

_If it was temptation, that god would sound like you._

“Then what?”

“A story for another time,” he says. Attempts to extract himself from the scarf, but finds his hands trapped beneath the weight of Chuck’s grasp. “You need this back.”

“Keep it.”

“I don’t –”

“You need it.” Assurance squeezes his fingers. Warm breath brushes his cheek as Chuck’s hands fix his collar. “Don’t argue, sir.”

Ron fixes his gaze on something beyond sky-blue eyes and the stubbornest man he knows. Watches the blues and whites of winter wage their own war on the earth that pulses beneath his feet.

He stands in the middle of the forest and lets himself be claimed by something altogether wild.

* * *

He can’t stop shaking.

Can’t stop thinking, either, and perhaps that’s the danger of being left alive long enough to bear witness.

“He’s asleep.”

Ron closes his eyes. Opens them again as Chuck settles down on the stairs beside him and huffs out a breath.

“I’m surprised you got him to fall asleep at all,” he whispers, careful to not let his concern carry farther than the landing above their heads. “Are you sure..?”

“Out like a light. Tab’s wrapped real tight around him, though.” Chuck’s fingers tremble along with his shaky exhale. “I think it just got.. too much. He’s been alternating between crying and just.. staring. Mostly the staring.”

He reaches out. Tangles his fingers with Chuck’s own and doesn’t care who’s around to see. They’re the only ones awake in this house, as far as he knows, but he’d grasp them even in a crowded room now. Would cling to them the way he’d clung to the fabric of Chuck’s uniform earlier today, as if he fears him vanishing into something unknown and unreal.

“Tab’s stronger than any of us,” laughs Chuck, but the sound is weak and joyless. “He’s just been there while I drift helplessly from room to room. Lieb’s been crumbling against him since..”

“Since Winters gave that order.”

Distaste coats his tongue. Poisons the words. He draws his knees up and leans into the rage.

“Web was right fucking there to translate that,” says Chuck, and there’s judgment in the way it’s said too. “The.. The weight of that. Ron, I don’t know.”

He doesn’t comment on how he’s suddenly not sir or captain, locked in formality, or Speirs, locked in story. He’s just Ron now, sitting on the staircase in an enemy’s house, holding hands with the lone voice of reason that pierces the haze of the dark that is set to swallow him whole.

“I’ll talk with Liebgott,” he decides. “Later. When we’re clear of this town. Clear of the smoke.”

Where the voices of the dead don’t follow, where the birds pick up song again, that’s where he’ll reach out and give voice to something he hopes is understanding. Where the world begins to make sense anew, and war no longer is an ugly thing that threatens to tear them all apart.

“What of our talk?”

“Ours?”

His hands still shake, even gripped tight as they are, and maybe it’s just that Chuck’s hands are shaking with grief too that’s making them impossible to still in motion. Maybe it’s the shared weight that threatens to sink him all the way to the ocean floor to await an ancient god’s parting of the sea once more.

“Shared pain is more easily carried.”

“I don’t have the words.”

He loses a breath at the fluttering, small, careful brush of lips against his cheek. _Who said anything about speaking?_ The question floats between them before he turns his face to the face he could draw from memory even as all other thoughts vanish from his mind. _Who said we need words with which to speak at all?_

He slips from his cage and kisses freedom for the first time.

* * *

Ron focuses on the weight. Lets himself be pulled taut like an anchor’s chain, fathoms below in waters unknown, and fears not the stillness that comes with the long wait. If there is gravity in this room at all, it’s not the ground beneath his boots or the air he breathes. He knows the weight of this touch. Has learned the warmth that flares to life with it, even when there is no easy smile to accompany its familiar curl around his fingers now.

There is something of death here. He knows this, too. Has learned it at the feet of never surrender, studied it under the tattered wings of mercy, and attempted to keep it at bay with every story told and retold. There is always one more morning to bargain for. One more life to barter, too, and until this moment he’s only ever had to haggle the price of his own.

_A coin is flipped under the watchful gaze of the ferryman,_ streams out into his mind before he can halt the tide. _A coin is paid to the piper, always, and silver pieces are lain on the eyes of the departed._

He’s taken jewels from their homes. Has lifted candlesticks and silver trays, collected pieces of cutlery, shipped off finest pearls. He’s bartered his way through all of Germany – _one more night, one more morning, one more battle,_ he’d said, and offered the loot to the sea and sky.

And now, come Austria, the flipped coin lands on its own edge.

He scarcely dares breathe for fear of upsetting it. If there is breath to be found in lungs here, let it be in the rise and fall of the chest of the man lying so still before him. Let his own lungs sacrifice to the coin and flip it to the scale of the living. Let his breath leave his blood and body to take up residence beneath the skin of another, to keep another warm and flared to life beneath his cooling fingers, so that life eternal is returned to these eyes not yet ready to meet the silver bargain.

He taps out a heartbeat with his fingers. Taps once, twice. Beat. Pause. Beat. Tap. Pause. Tap. Presses his fingers to Chuck’s hand and mimics the flow of blood. Sets the pace of a heart, a pulse, a living thing.

_Come on,_ he presses into the other’s skin. _Breathe_ , he sends as a reminder to the hand so warm in his own. _Live_ , he taps out. And, yes, truth be told, he sends it as a command. Sends it in the sternest voice, though he knows Chuck would just laugh and call it unnecessary, and clips the word before his tongue lilts into the language that used to deal with bargains struck between Fair Folk and humanity.

He knows what the army surgeon thinks long before the man opens his mouth. It doesn’t take a genius to determine the nervous, restless energy of a just-awoken medic with more liquor than courage in his veins. He feels the vibration in the air beside him and taps more life into the weight of this soul he attempts to root to earth, bone, blood, and breath.

He barely blinks against the flaring light. Pats a reassuring pattern – _in breath, out breath, there we go_ – into this body before him just the way he’d coaxed calm from the squalling baby he’d held for far too short a time. He tangles his fingers with more intent, slots into the open space between the other’s fingers, and folds around the hand as though he can grip the weight and keep it steady there. He welcomes the thrum of life beneath his fingers the way his son’s heart had fluttered against his bare chest, skin to skin and head come to rest in the hollow of his throat where he keeps his own pulse, and he offers a soundless prayer with no words to match it.

“He’s not gonna make it,” comes the verdict, then, swift and piercing, and makes sound blur together in a high-pitched whirl a moment. “Need a brain surgeon” – he hears, between the rush of blood in his ears and the pulse that flares to life in the wrist beneath his fingertips – “don’t think there is any hope.”

He has never been clinical about death. Death is a spray of blood from an artery, a cut-off breath punctured by a bullet, a sharp blade cutting through flesh, a whistle and bang as the world whitens and pierces shards of pain through ears and lungs alike, and the long wait in the cold and hard earth before battle. The death he knows isn’t proclaimed over tables, given in beds, or ever welcomed quietly. Death isn’t sanitary, or wielded like a surgeon’s scalpel, and he’s sick of the dismissal before any fight has taken place.

_Stay alive,_ he squeezes into the hand he holds steady like a lifeline. _Fight the tide._

The orders he barks are fast, like lightning flashing into a darkened room, and the responses even swifter. There’s a shift in the air as he aligns with the love that’s already carried in this room, on this stretcher, in the gazes of the men he is surrounded by. And it’s easy, then, to claw his way back from the ferryman’s shores. Easier still to reach out, lift the coin from the table, and defy all the gods in heaven.

It is the first and only time he feels he saves a life.

* * *

Lavender curls against him at this hour.

He wakes from slumber before he can taste the lemon on his tongue. His hand folds around white linen. His fingertips streak the sheets with red – with something of copper, of iron, lingering in defiance of bargains struck and won.

For a moment, stretched so thin in the twilight hours of this day, he fears himself back in England.

The dusk settles around his body. There’s something of midnight already afoot in the corners of the room. Dark folds around the lamp light and comes to pool at his feet. His arms are heavy with the weight of dreams.

He shakes his head. Allows the sense of a child to fade, to dim, to move back to the shadow where he keeps his son. He inhales lavender once more and wishes he wasn’t called _father_. Wishes to spare the child the streaks of red on white linen, the night that coats his tongue and paints his company with tar, and the weight in his hands that’s set to burn. If his son stands to inherit this world from him, he knows it will take more than scorched earth and barren soil to build from.

He doesn’t know how to build anything at all.

Warmth brushes against his skin. He shifts his hand closer to the heat. Sighs as a reassuring pattern is tapped against his fingers. Slower than a heartbeat, steadier than his pulse, and warmer than his body.

“W-where’d you g-go?”

“Some dream or other,” he murmurs in response as he relinquishes his hold on the sheets. “Somewhere colder than here.”

He allows the other’s fingers to tangle with his own. Allows this trembling left hand to wrap around the hand he keeps so steady, as though the marble he’s hewn out of is covered by a fluttering gauze that flatters its existence so much more. He shifts his fingers until he can repeat the pattern – _tap, tap_ – against the other’s skin.

“I had a d-dream, too.”

“Tell me about it?” He keeps the command clear of his voice. There’s no need to force the words, nor a need to demand them. He ducks his head a little as he leans back in his seat and offers a trade. “I dreamed of my son again, like before.”

“Like before,” says Chuck, “I th – I-I th-think – it is g-guilt talking. From you.” Life is squeezed gently into his fingers with every word, so as to diminish judgment. “It’s not your life, Ron. A-and it is okay for.. for it to be th-that way.”

“I’m trying to let that be okay.”

He keeps his gaze on the colors that paint the sky with purple and midnight blue. He doesn’t need to meet those eyes to know they are as calm and steady as they have been all this time. He doesn’t need to glance sideways to witness the fact that there are things even a bullet cannot destroy.

Tap. Tap. A heartbeat drummed into his skin in reassurance. It’s the oldest language he thinks he knows.

“I d-dreamed of home. Of the sea.” Chuck sounds tired. His speech slurs around the edges, turns sibilant in parts, and his grasp almost loosens. “The sun on the water. I love.. I want. Th-th-that.”

“You’re going home in a week from now, if all goes well.”

He tries not to think about it. Doesn’t quite know what he will do at the end of each day, then, if not drive to this space and lose himself in the liminal hours at this bedside. Fear tinges his tongue, sharper and sourer than any lemon in summer, at the thought of being left. At the idea of not being the one to do the leaving, for once, and not knowing what follows after that.

“W-without you.”

A hiss of breath follows the tight, tight squeeze of Chuck’s left hand around his own. There’s pain in the inhale and exhale. He’s learned to detect the sound. Learned to recognize the whimper that hides in the back of his lover’s throat. He squeezes back as gently as possible. Softens his grip to be less of a weapon.

“You’ll be in good hands,” he says, and almost believes it.

“They – they –” attempts Chuck, hissing under his breath, “the-their h-hands.. not y-yours.”

He can’t argue with this. Can’t find the words that resolve the weight that unfolds between Chuck’s hand and his own. His heartbeat thrums to life in his ears. He traces patterns into the other’s skin, traps his feelings in the spaces between one moment and the next, and keeps his eyes on the fading light.

_I’ll follow,_ he taps between one beat of his heart and the next. _Anywhere you lead me._

“Ron.”

He wishes he had the words. Wishes he had some assurance beyond the warmth of his hands and his presence in this room. Wishes it came as easily as crying out for havoc, running toward ruin and the end of the world, dancing on the edge of a bombed-out building’s highest floor.

“Yeah?” he asks, instead, and lets the hope linger.

Of the two of them, Chuck was always the braver. Always the one who fought death and won.

“Time to go home.”

He lowers his head to the other’s heart and dares dream of victory.


End file.
